Category Archives: Nature

The Breath of the Morning Bird

Posted on April 16, 2016 by Sandy Stott | Comments Off

By Corinne H. Smith

The air is full of the notes of birds, — song sparrows, red-wings, robins (singing a strain), bluebirds, — and I hear also a lark, — as if all the earth had burst forth into song. The influence of this April morning has reached them, for they live out-of-doors all the night, and there is no danger that they will oversleep themselves such a morning. ~ Thoreau’s journal, April 2, 1852
Morning has broken like the first morning,
Blackbird has spoken like the first bird.
~ Eleanor Farjeon, “Morning Has Broken”

Each spring I look forward to hearing what I call the First Bird of the Morning. He’s the first one to wake up and the first one to sing his song. He sings for a few minutes, then he stops. There’s a momentary pause throughout the neighborhood. (For all I know, the other birds may have groaned, mumbled, and hit their snooze buttons.) After 20-30 minutes of relative calm, the rest of the avian residents finally wake up and chime in, with the First Bird of the Morning leading the chorus. It’s a lovely symphony that filters into the inch of air allowed by my open bedroom window.

Over the past decade, I’ve witnessed different species claim First Bird status. The first year I paid attention to this phenomenon, a robin took center stage. The next year, it was a mourning dove. I’ve heard first melodies from a house finch, a Carolina wren, and from someone I could never quite identify. This year, my First Bird is a song sparrow. And what a singer he is! He seems quite proud to have claimed the first arbor vitae bush next to the carport. He wants to tell the world exactly where his new home is. And his favorite stage of all is the stop sign at the corner.

Yesterday, my morning started like any other. I got up at 5 a.m. and fired up the computer and the teapot. By dawn I had finished with e-mail and social media and had turned to work on current projects. The morning bird music was “on” in the background. I heard the song sparrow again as a soloist after the sun had come up over the horizon. I thought I knew where he would be sitting for his performance. And sure enough, when I looked out the living room window, I saw him perched on the top edge of the stop sign.

But as I watched him rear back his head and offer his beautiful tiny notes to the sky, I saw something else, too. We had been under a frost warning overnight. No white coating covered the grass, but the outside thermometer still hovered around 30°. Accordingly, each time the First Bird sang, little white puffs of his breath came out, too. I had never seen such evidence of bird breath. I stood transfixed and said “Wow” with each delivery.

Sparrow sings

It was the smallest possible sighting, really: the exhalation of a warm-blooded creature into the chilly atmosphere that surrounded him. An inconsequential observance, most would say. And yet it struck an immediate chord with me. How often do we remember that these animals are breathing the same air that we are? That their little bodies have functioning life systems like ours do? (Each one “a parcel of vain strivings,” as Mr. Thoreau might say.) Probably rarely, if ever, and not as much as we should. But it’s solid proof that we are all connected by living together on this same home planet. I wonder if he saw MY breath in return when I carried the garbage bag out to the curb a few minutes later.

I grabbed the camera and tried to get photos of First Bird, but I can’t seem to get him in focus. You can get an impression of him, but you can’t see exactly what I saw. You’ll just have to take my word for it. The picture remains clear enough in my own mind’s eye.

As I type these sentences now in the following morning, I hear the song sparrow again. Sure enough, he’s sitting on the stop sign. But the air is a few degrees warmer than it was yesterday. I watch intently and I don’t see puffs of his breath. Too bad. I will always remember what they looked like, though. And I will remind myself to always acknowledge that he and I – and all the rest of them — are indeed fellow creatures sharing one single environment.

Editor’s Note: Corinne’s recently released book, Thoreau for Kids, drew a very fine review in the Chicago Tribune the other day. Here’s a link to that review: http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/books/ct-prj-henry-david-thoreau-for-kids-20160414-story.html

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Posted in Arts, Environment, General, Henry David Thoreau, Literature, Living Deliberately, Nature, News and Events, The Roost, Thoreau Quote

Water Notes – of ducks and rafts and peepers (and eagles)

Posted on April 14, 2016 by Sandy Stott | Comments Off

“These deep withdrawn bays, like that toward Well Meadow, are resorts for many a shy flock of ducks. They are very numerous this afternoon.” Thoreau, Journal, 4/17/52

Just as winter past seemed reluctant, seemed never to fully arrive, so too, thus far, our spring. I realize that I write this from Maine, an Eliotland where April’s often likened to cruel illusion rather than a real season, but still…even Mainers yearn for a mild day, when the hair on your arms lies down like a dog content.

But cold or no, spring keeps announcing itself, and for me, the urgency of that announcement joined two calls overheard recently.

While cold-water paddling the other day, my friend Geoff and I came upon a raft of ducks that formed a comma more than a quarter mile long in the middle of the bay – more than a “raft,” perhaps we should call such a duck-gathering a “ship” or a “flotilla” of ducks. Anyway, it was an impressive piece of feathered punctuation curved across the water.

The duck-comma looked a little like this cloud, except, of course, on the water.

Rafting-up’s also a term in kayaking that describes a temporary bonding of boats for stability, for respite. To do so, you simply sidle up parallel to each other and lay your paddles across your foredecks, and then lay your hands on top of the paddles; this gives you a joined formation that allows for chart-reading, snacking, relaxing, etc. with no need to keep a paddle in the water for stability

Such rafts, all rafts are makeshift craft, cobbled together for a time before their parts float or fly away. Here, we are duck-like in our joinings.

As we drew near, curious sound floated our way over to the water. Any number of this multitude of ducks were making a sound like peepers, which also have just emerged in our vernal pools and bogs. And then I wondered, (fancifully, I know) if the ducks had learned their one-note song from hanging out in swamps inland.

But, on longer listen, their group sound was less frantic than that of our frogs with their shrill, gotta-have-it-now trill that’s so aptly mimicked and amplified in the movie Psycho. There, it stands for the drive of perverse appetite that’s just around the filmic corner, and it stands your hair on end. Our ducks were more in mutter’s register than in pulsing matter’s; no need to paddle for our lives.

Anyway, it was a fine vision and sound, even as we tried to stay at respectful distance to keep them from flying (which would have been other-spectacle, but not one we’d like attributed to us). So, exactly which duck-folk they were remains mystery only to be known if they’d flown.

Not far from the duck-water, we noted a vacancy – the eagle’s nest on Little Iron Island sat empty in its oak. It is a handsome construction, and we wondered why it had no family this year. Perhaps, we speculated, the parent eagles were still exhausted from raising the eaglet we had named August, as we’d witnessed any number of tantrum-moments as August grew. During one fit, sticks had actually been flung up and out of the nest amid great squalling; the parents sitting wearily on branches to either side had simply looked at each other and endured. Maybe next year we’ll forgo this, they seemed to say.

August the eagle’s empty nest

Otherwise, the day featured expanses of cold, blue-greeny water, and also the sight of an osprey bearing grassy stringers to its nest-in-the-making, though the nest was already pretty impressive in outline, and so the grassy stuff might have been comfort-lining. May they both be comfortable until the little ones hatch, at which point they, like all parents in the 24-hour cycle of infants, like August’s eagles, will both be weary ospreys.

Spring water

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Posted in Arts, General, Henry David Thoreau, Literature, Living Deliberately, Nature, News and Events, The Roost, Thoreau Quote

Remembering Jim Harrison

Posted on April 10, 2016 by Sandy Stott | Comments Off

by Scott Berkley

In his biographical sketch of Henry Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson excused his friend and protégé’s fixation on local matters at the same time that he made a good case for Thoreau’s Concord-adoration. “I think his fancy for referring everything to the meridian of Concord did not grow out of any ignorance or depreciation of other longitudes or latitudes,” wrote Emerson, “but was rather a playful expression of his conviction of the indifferency of all places, and that the best place for each is where he stands.”

One of the places where Thoreau stood.

What Emerson calls the “indifferency” of place, however, we might see as the deep and abiding respect of the writer for local material and what it means. Thoreau, one of the great exemplars of writing from where one stands, has descendants in the poetry of place scattered across our fifty states. One of the greatest was the novelist and poet Jim Harrison, who passed away in late March after many years of wandering his beloved home ranges, first in the upper Midwest and later in the Arizona desert.

As all the obituaries that sprang up after Harrison’s passing have noted, he was prolific enough to make a new reader wonder where to start. Among more than twenty books of fiction, his 2004 novel True North stands out in my mind as a particularly Thoreauvian engagement with the Great Lakes and the land surrounding them: from the back woods of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula; to the cities of Marquette, Sault Sainte Marie, and Duluth; stretching down along the Ohio River all the way to lake-less Indiana. Of course, it being Harrison, it is also a romp through a spread of pleasures both gustatory and sexual – matters that would have been too worldly for the nineteenth-century concerns of Mr. Thoreau.

Yet as in any of his novels, food and sex bolster True North just as much as Harrison’s carefully-honed prose style, making it an unusually sensitive meditation on the landscape and on the way we become ourselves in a world of knowing and unknowing, ancestors and descendants, ordered thinking and chaotic doing. David Burkett III, Harrison’s half-blundering, half-tragic protagonist, wrestles with the self much as young Henry did when first arriving at Walden Pond from the schools of Concord and Cambridge:

… I had high school and college courses in many aspects of the natural sciences but they didn’t enable me to put together the whole picture of what I was seeing around me. It had long been obvious to me that I wanted to know too much, perhaps more than anyone was capable of … I learned in my anthropology course that people prayed in every single culture. But where did the urge to know everything come from?

One can see David thinking all this while rowing a boat downriver, much like Henry Thoreau out floating on the Pond at the moment in Walden that he realizes, “my head is hands and feet.” David loves to row – and we imagine Harrison did, too –because it gives him a view of the past without allowing him to fixate on the future. As David comes to know his Midwestern landscape in search of his family’s history running an extractive logging operation, we realize his “project” is in conversation with Thoreau’s own sense of how to know a place anew, more deeply than ever before.

April water at Walden

I wonder often what Henry Thoreau would have written had he survived his illnesses and lived to be sixty or seventy. It is unlikely that he would have become the sort of novelist and raconteur that Harrison still was in his seventies, but undoubtedly he would have kept his custom of spending several daily hours in the act of sauntering, encircling Concord with his footsteps over and over. An older David Burkett, late in True North, goes out on foot in the desert mesas of southern Arizona. After falling repeatedly in the steep and rocky terrain, he learns how different the place is from the forests and marshes of Michigan. “I was a flatlander, simple as that,” he admits. “One day I ran across a biologist disassembling a pack rat nest and midden and he said it took years to learn a new landscape.”

Constantly attuned and devoted to the act of learning the landscape through the saunterer’s vision, Thoreau and his words will endure in part because we come to know Concord so intimately through his. Who but Jim Harrison could have been the deviant saunterer of the upper Midwest, a place that we now know through his words and thus through his eyes.

Scott Berkley is a Middlebury College senior and AMC hutman; he’s writing a thesis on Wallace Stevens and looking forward to summer at Galehead Hut in the White Mountains.

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Posted in Arts, General, Henry David Thoreau, Historic Preservation, Literature, Living Deliberately, Nature, News and Events, The Roost, Walden